Mario Renato Capecchi is an Italian-born American molecular geneticist and Nobel Prize winner and Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine, which he joined in 1973.  His life story provides a variety of examples of how professional development is linked to personal growth.

Mario was born in the Italian city of Verona in 1937 as the only child of an abusive father (Luciano) and a caring mother (Lucy) who worked as a poet and antifascist campaigner.  Lucy refused to marry Mario's father. When Mario was around three years of age German officers arrested his mother and set her to a concentration camp leaving Mario to fend for himself.  For a time he lived with a family friend but when money ran out to support him, and he refused to live with his father, young Mario found himself a street orphan at the age of four and a half.

Persevere difficult situations - Between the ages of four and a half and nine Mario wandered around the streets of wartime Italy.  As Tim Harford wrote in Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, "Mario survived on scraps, joined gangs and drifted in and out of orphanages and eventually had to be hospitalized for a year probably due to typhoid."  At nine years of age, after not seeing his mother for almost six years and being homeless for almost as long, Mario was reunited with her after she spent nearly 18 months looking for him. With the help of relatives in the U.S. both Mario and Lucy left for America soon after they were reunited.

Believed he created his own life - With the support of a relatives and friends in Pennsylvania, Mario enrolled in school and eventually graduated from George School, a Quaker boarding school in Bucks County. He then graduated from Antioch College in Ohio with a BS in chemistry and physics in 1961 when he was 24 years of age.  Mario enrolled at MIT's graduate program to study physics and mathematics but subsequently became interested in molecular biology and transferred to Harvard to join the lab of James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.  Capecchi received his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1967 under the tutelage of Watson.

From 1967 to 1973 Capecchi held various faculty positions at Harvard but grew increasingly alarmed at its results driven environment. Despite objections from Watson, who once quipped "Capecchi accomplished more as a graduate student than most scientists accomplish in a lift time and that he would be fucking crazy to pursue his studies anywhere other than in the cutting edge intellectual atmosphere of Harvard," Capecchi left Harvard to join a new department at the University of Utah. Capecchi believed that the short-term gratification environment at Harvard limited his ability to breathe if he was to do great work.

Believe in yourself when others do not and taking calculated risks - During the 1980s Capecchi took another professional risk when he used money from two NIH grants to conduct research on a third grant that was denied funding.  Despite the odds of success and with his reputation on the line, Capecchi achieve a revolutionary breakthrough with his research involving a mouse's DNA. Eventually, Capacchi and two colleagues, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies created the first knockout mouse in 1989, for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2007.  "As the NIH's expert panel had earlier admitted, when agreeing to renew his funding: 'We are glad you didn't follow our advice.'"